This section is intended to introduce the reader to various aspects of art, which may be related to various aspects of the present invention that are described and/or claimed below. This discussion is believed to be helpful in providing the reader with background information to facilitate a better understanding of the various aspects of the present invention. Accordingly, it should be understood that these statements are to be read in this light, and not as admissions of prior art.
DNA storage techniques, as for example the one depicted in the document WO2013/178801 or in the article entitled “Next Generation Digital Information Storage in DNA” by G. M. Church et al., published in Science, 337:1628, 2012, rely on processes that have been developed for biology. Generally, the overall process consist in the five following steps: (i) encoding data to nucleotide sequences, (ii) writing data to DNA strands by synthesis (the synthesis process consist in printing. Its main characteristics are that it is relatively costly, and that it has a non-negligible error-rate), (iii) replicating DNA strands using a biochemical reaction (such as the PCRA, which stands for plasmid copy reduced; the PCRA is a relatively inexpensive bio-chemical reaction that produces many replicates of sequences that begin by a given primer. This allows selecting a subset of strands. This replication offers a protection against the alteration of a given strand, yet it just replicates error that happened before (e.g. during the synthesis), (iv) reading DNA strands by sequencing (the sequencing consists in picking randomly strands in a solution and reading their nucleotides (nucleotide by nucleotide). The error-rate per nucleotide is rather high) and (v) decoding the sequences of nucleotides to recover the data.
In order to avoid the loss of information, the technique of document WO2013/178801 uses an overlapping technique of DNA segments that create a kind of redundancy. The FIG. 2 of document WO2013/178801 presents a plurality of overlapping DNA segments that can ease the recovering of information during the sequencing. Indeed, it is necessary to use a protection against the loss of information due to the fact that there is a relatively high level of error during the steps of synthesis and sequencing.
The proposed technique proposes an alternative to the technique of document WO2013/178801 that can make the reading process much more efficient. The proposed technique also avoids using overlapping technique, and/or consensus technique.